The Tao Of Personhood Yin Yang

The 3 rd Annual Terasem Colloquium
The Tao of Personhood: The Yin and Yang of the Property-Person Continuum

Challenges
Expansion of Legal and Ethical Definitions of the Person in a Technical Environment (“Evolving Notions of Personhood”)

3 Case Scenarios in the not-so-distant future
Chimpanzee with vocal cords
Artificial womb – personhood will no longer depend viability or be tied to control over one’s own body
Cyborg soldiers, created with spare parts

Divergent Paths of Intelligence- Hardware, Software, Human
Three Overlapping Areas of Evolution
Sentient Machines (AI)
Disembodied Entities (Avatars)
Human Technogenics (or Cyborgs)

The NBIC Report Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance N anotechnology, B iotechnology, I nformation Technology, and C ognitive Science NSF/DOC-sponsored report June 2002 Arlington, Virginia

Improving work efficiency and learning
Enhancing sensory and cognitive capabilities
Revolutionary changes in healthcare
Enhancing human capabilities for military purposes
Nanotechnology-based implants
Brain-to-brain and brain-to-machine interfaces
Some anticipated NIBC payoffs (pp. ix-xi)

Human Intelligence Augmentation
to keep up with AI

CogAug & Uploads as Safe AGI
Perhaps all AGI should be driven by mammal-origin brains

Property – Personhood Dichotomy in Law
Historically, nonhuman animals have been considered “property”,
Slaves, women, and children were regarded as mere chattel until mid-to-late 1800’s and early 1900’s
Yet, nonhumans entities, such as corporations and ships have been recognized and given rights as “persons”

Humans and Persons
All humans are persons BUT, the law says…
All “persons” are NOT humans...for example, corporations, municipalities, even ships have been granted status as persons by the US Supreme Court

Current Legal Spectrum
U.S. Supreme Court cases provide a spectrum:
“ Natural” Persons (e.g. aliens, minors, illegitimate) to
“ Juridical” Persons (e.g., corporations, labor unions, municipalities, government units.
No current legislative or statutory definition

One Proposed Legal (Statutory) Definition
The term "human being" means:
(i) any entity possessing one or more of the higher faculties such as: the ability to reason (including, but not limited to, the ability to use facts and argue them, to arrive at conclusions from premises in a logical manner, to explain observed phenomena and to form beliefs based on facts);

Definition cont’d
the ability to evaluate principles and observations to arrive at reasoned decisions;
the ability to formulate speech and communicate;
the ability to write;
the ability to develop meaningful personal relationships with other human beings on the basis of equality;
the demonstration of awareness of self as a unique and separate being; the ability to feel concern for others;
or any other higher faculty;

Definition cont’d
(ii) any viable creature that is the result of the union of ovum and sperm of parents who are human beings, whether or not the union of ovum and sperm was in utero, and whether or not the genetic material of the resulting embryo was scientifically altered.

Some Ethical/legal Issues in Converging Tech we are likely to face over the next 25 years
Privacy, confidentiality
Informed consent (Artificial Research Subjects)
Augmentation: Enhancement vs. therapeutic, the President’s commission report
Emotions, competence, autonomy, and the law
Capability and culpability (proportional autonomy)
Synthetic humans: are they persons or property?
Issues of Identity
A new lexicon, taxonomy to describe new, complex relationships. (Personal Cognitive Aides)
Issues of justice and equity (the “digital divide”)

Criteria for Personhood?
All Living Things
Consciousness
Sentience
Peter Singer & Tom Regan
Self-Awareness
Rationality
Descartes

Joseph Fletcher’s 15 Propositions for Personhood
1. minimum intelligence,
2. self-awareness,
3. self-control
4. a sense of time
5. a sense of futurity
6. a sense of the past
7. the capability of relating to others,
8. concern for others,
9. communication
10. control of existence
11. curiosity,
12. change and changeability
13. balance of rationality and feeling,
14. idiosyncrasy
15. neocortical functioning

What Beings Should be Considered Persons?
Fetuses? (Personhood for Embryos Referendum in Colorado)
Animals?
Artificial Intelligence?
Categories in between?
Beings with Numerous Neural Implants and Augmentations?

Robot Rights
Which minds have which rights and responsibilities?
Engineering slave minds vs.
Flourishing minds, but within social limits?

Sex and Marriage with Robots?
First, AI has to attain the status of legal personhood before any such thing as marriage (or any other contractual relationship for that matter) is recognized. Secondly, What do humans owe “purpose-built” machines who begin to reach awareness, or to so resemble awareness that it becomes a selling point?
Thirdly, would these robots be sentient -- capable of experience pleasure and pain? Because the act of creating potentially sentient beings carries with it the corresponding responsibility for their actions and for the impact on the human community, the biosphere of the earth and the universe as a whole.

What the Courts have said…
The U.S. Court of International Trade, in Toy Biz, Inc. v. United States in tariff dispute
U.S. Customs classified the action figures as dolls representing only human beings.
Toy Biz argued that the action figures were toys or non-human creatures (i.e. robots and monsters).
The Court held that the action figures did not represent human beings because they had ‘robotic’ features or ‘monster-like’ features.

Identity and Rights
Jack-O-Lantern case – US Supreme Court 1922
'In rebuilding operations the test is whether the identity of the vessel has continued, or has been extinguished…
This court has not undertaken and will not now essay to announce rigid definitions of repairs and new construction; but we do not accept the suggestion that the two things can be accurately differentiated by consideration of the ultimate use to which the vessel is to be devoted.
Held despite extensive repairs, identity remained the same

Legal and Ethical Considerations
While the law is well-equipped to hold an autonomous individual culpable for his or her actions, the law is not so well designed for such systems.
These emerging technologies presents a unique challenge for the legal profession to help shape policy, since the technology is cutting-edge and statutes, case law, or law journals are usually written after the fact.

Rights of the Individual vs. Rights of Persons
Persons vs. Property
Persons -> Persons + Augmentation <-Machines

One of the questions facing our courts will be: where do the rights of an autonomous system begin, assuming that an individual is an inherent part of that autonomous system?
Whether using a property-personhood dichotomy or property-person continuum, the rights of the individual may change when the human performance of the individual is enhanced by machine or other technology.
This raises issues about privacy, autonomy, and culpability.

Property-Personhood Continuum (Proposed Legal Paradigm) Property (Inanimate Objects) Full Personhood (Attendant rights & responsibilities) Quasi-property (Chimeric Humanoids) Fetuses Embryos Ex Utero Cyborgs Androids A/I Negative Liberties Biotechnology at the Margins of Personhood: An Evolving Legal Paradigm, J. of Evolution and Technology Cognitively impaired

Recommendations and Conclusions
As different forms of chimeras and cyborgs are created in the technical environments, the courts will be the ones to determine where these creations fall on the continuum of personhood.

Recommendations and Conclusions
The establishment of a common lexicon between policy makers, implementation agents, and multidisciplinary users for terms such as ‘autonomous’
The establishment of new lexicon for the new relationships that are being created as result of new technologies, with thoughtful consideration to the impact on current informed consent policy.
The possibility of legal reform and the creation of specialized science courts, where the judges will have ongoing education and training to recognize and deal with these new legal issues and categories that arise from emerging technologies.

A Double Edged Sword
“ Technology has always been a double-edged sword, empowering both our creative and our destructive natures. It has brought us longer and healthier lives, freedom from physical and mental drudgery, and many new creative possibilities. Yet it has also introduced new and salient dangers…Stalin’s tanks and Hitler’s trains used technology. And we still live today with sufficient nuclear weapons—not all of which appear to be well accounted for—to end all mammalian life on the planet.” – Ray Kurzweil

Thank you for your attention!
For further info, references contact me at [email_address]

The Tao Of Personhood Yin Yang

by Linda MacDonald Glenn on Sep 17, 2009

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